[Pkg-xen-devel] XCP and OpenXenCenter

[Mike McClurg]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs at debian.org> wrote:
> On 07/01/2011 12:32 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
>> See:
>> http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XenCommonProblems#head-cb533d9953d9d4b0c1f23d968331f3a620209fc3
>>
>> xm/xend toolstack does not fully support XenAPI, for example xend does not
>> implement "pools" concept. So you cannot use use OpenXenCenter/OpenXenManager with "normal" Xen.
>>
>> Also, xm/xend toolstack is deprecated upstream, and it was replaced with xl/libxl toolstack in Xen 4.1,
>> which does not support XenAPI at all.
>>
>> Full XenAPI support is built into "xapi" toolstack, which is a totally different toolstack
>> compared to xm/xend and xl/libxl. xapi was opensourced in 2009, and it's currently
>> used in Citrix XenServer and in Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).
>>
>> There is an ongoing effort to package XCP components for Debian/Ubuntu, but that'll take
>> some time, because it's a pretty big effort, since it involves a lot of *other* packages
>> and not-yet-upstream patches to other subsystems/packages aswell, not just the xapi library/binary.
>>
>> XenServer and XCP are a dedicated virtualization platform with a lot of integration to multiple
>> components.. ie. a purpose-built virtualization platform instead of generic Linux distro.
>>
>> I think the Debian/Ubuntu packaging/integration will be discussed at upcoming
>> Xen Summit North America in the beginning of August, if you're interested.
>>
>> http://xen.org/community/xensummit.html
>> http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2011/06/22/xen-summit-2011-agenda-and-speaker-lineup/
>
> Thanks Pasi and others. I will subscribe to this list to keep track of
> this effort.
>
> --
> Ritesh Raj Sarraf | http://people.debian.org/~rrs
> Debian - The Universal Operating System
>

Hi Ritesh,

I'm one of the developers working on the Debian port of XenAPI. We've
made some good progress and have a working prototype of the software,
and we are preparing to start packaging. As Pasi said, this has been a
purpose-built appliance and not a standalone application, so it's
taking some time to refactor our software to comply with Debian
packaging rules.

In addition to new packages that we'll be making, we will need the
OCaml libraries from the Xen distribution built as a product of the
Xen source Debian package. We have a prototype of this, but we're not
expert Debian packages. If anyone feels like giving us a hand with
this, we'd really appreciate it. If you'd like, we can submit our
current patches to this list for review, though they're unacceptable
at the moment. Thanks for the interest in XenAPI,

Mike McClurg